My fascination with clouds doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. My first up close and personal encounter with them came during advanced flight training in Kingsville TX. There was a period of several weeks when we practiced aircraft carrier landing approaches to a concrete runway that was firmly affixed to the earth. That was work. The outlying field at which we did this was some 80 or so miles from Kingsville. As advanced students, once we completed our work, we were pretty much on our own returning to home base. Often, the 10 to 15-minute trip back to Kingsville turned into a 4 plane follow the leader tail chase around the puffy little cumulous clouds that rolled in off the Gulf of Mexico. That was great fun and left visual impressions that are sometimes still appearing in my paintings.
A couple of decades later I discovered soaring. There are some remarkable similarities between flying gliders and flying tactical military aircraft, but the understanding and appreciation of clouds required for soaring flight is on a whole different level. Somewhere along the almost 40-year journey of trying to better read and understand clouds, I became aware of the “Cloud Appreciation Society.” CAS was launched in 2005 by Gavin Pretor-Pinney to bring together people around the world who share a love of the sky. My kind of people. There are at present over 60,000 members who receive a cloud of the day in their email. I look forward to seeing mine each morning.
It turns out that Gavin had never inspected clouds from aloft. So, in 2018 my friend Kempton took him up to do so. They were fortunate enough to fly on a day when a phenomenon known as a standing mountain wave was present in the lee of the Sierra Nevada mountains. That meant that they were able to rapidly climb up to 17,000 feet without an engine and closely examine a lenticular cloud. A good time was had by all.
Note to my glider pilot friends: I’m aware that some of the clouds in my paintings are perhaps meteorologically improbable. In the cockpit, you must fly the clouds that the day provides. In the studio, you have the freedom to fly with any clouds that convey a sense of atmosphere and the vastness of that ocean of air above the earth’s surface.
Meanwhile Back in the Studio….
Part of the Cloud Appreciation Society manifesto states that, “We believe that clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.” I certainly agree with that sentiment. Although I am no longer actively piloting, my head is still in the clouds. I’ve completed a series of small-scale studies and feel emboldened to set forth on the next stage of the journey which is turning the studies into large format paintings. The first one (37”x64”) looks like this –
Various stops along the way looked like this --
I started work on this piece in early January and the goal is to get between 8 and 10 of these rascals out there this year. That means I’m a little behind schedule. I’d better get busy.